| THE LAST OF ENGLAND : Alfonso Cuaron's 'Children of Men' [8/10] |
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| Tuesday, 17 October 2006 | ||
 The title is bland, the script is based on a novel written by a septuagenarian (now octogenarian) Baroness, and the director is best known for a Harry Potter picture: but Children of Men manages to shatter all expectations to emerge as the most crunchingly brutal, nerve-janglingly tense and grippingly relentless thriller you'll see all year. The script - unpromisingly credited to no less than five different writers - isn't without its problems, but director Cuaron, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubetzki and editor Alex Rodriguez easily surmount such shortcomings to deliver a tough, harrowingly believable vision of Britain in the year 2027. Due to a mysterious, global fertility crisis, it's been over eighteen years since the birth of the last human child; terrorism has laid waste to many corners of the globe; the UK has consequently become a paranoid fortress-state where illegal immigrants are hunted, caged and maltreated. Dissidents are demonised and marginalised, operating as armed underground militias - and many former radicals have long since given up the struggle and sought a quieter life. These include Theo Fearon (Clive Owen), a low-ranking and notably non-energetic apparatchik at the Ministry of Energy. He's contacted out of the blue by his former partner Julian (Julianne Moore) who asks him to pull the necessary government strings so that transit documents can be provided for a young woman named Kee (Claire Hope-Ashitey). Theo is initially reluctant to get involved - and it's only when he meets Kee that he comes to appreciate the true gravity and urgency of the situation into which he's been unwittingly thrust... Adapted from a prize-winning 1992 novel by P D James (formally Baroness James of Holland Park), Children of Men (title pointedly trimmed from James's The Children of Men) is unashamedly ambitious. In the established tradition of 'futuristic' or 'science fiction' tales, James and the scriptwriters are clearly making points about current society as much as they are issuing a cautionary bulletin about where we might end up at some just-around-the-corner future date. The film's (distinctly British) background-noise of terrorism, immigration, government surveillance and paranoia is pressingly topical - depressingly so, in fact, and Cuaron scores by showing us this nightmare world from the perspective of one particular individual. Theo features in pretty much every scene as either a participant or an eavesdropping observer and - thanks partly to Owen's nuanced, persuasive performance - we're left in no doubt about the nature of what becomes an exhausting, perilously dangerous physical ordeal (there's a particularly droll running 'gag' about the punishment inflicted upon his aching, perpetually ill-shod feet). It's such tiny touches which boost Children of Men's bracing air of realism and veracity: from the first scene until the last, we're totally immersed in this gritty, grubby, shabby, doomed world where violence can erupt at any time from any source (think 28 Days Later crossed with Last Resort, plus a dash of V For Vendetta.) Making skilful use of some seamlessly-blended special effects, and often achieving his results with single, audaciously-extended shots, Cuaron choreographs a string of brilliant, set-piece sequences in which our heroes must negotiate immediate, mortal danger. These including a particularly heartstopping ambush on a country road, the traumatic consequences of which colour everything that comes afterward. The climactic scenes in a 'refugee camp' at Bexhill-on-Sea (which turns out to be an enclosed prison-town along the lines of Escape From New York) also pack a hefty punch - sufficiently so to compensate for the way in which the religious parallels of Kee's story are made increasingly explicit (including angel-voices on the soundtrack) to the point that Cuaron could perhaps be accused of laying things on a bit thick. The race-against-time plot is already somewhat weighed down with social and political significance - it's never really clear, for example, how much the fertility crisis has got to do with the spiralling wave of terrorist violence which has seemingly overtaken much of the globe. And one could also accuse the five writers of biting off a little more than they, or we, can comfortably swallow - but it's surely preferable that a film like Children of Men should have too many ideas rather than too few, and in any case the picture as delivered by Cuaron and company is so powerfully gripping that you seldom have time to draw breath, let alone pick fault. Neil Young 17th October, 2006 CHILDREN OF MEN : [8/10] : UK (UK/USA) 2006 : Alfonso CUARON : 109 mins (BBFC timing) seen at Empire cinema, Sunderland (UK), 16th October 2006 - public show (ticket price £4.00) with thanks to Paul Callaghan  The Last of England, Ford Madox Brown (1852) reproduced with permission of Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery
http://www.victorianartinbritain.co.uk/maddox_england.htm |
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